The water hit him like a physical blow, slamming his chest against the jagged floor stones and extinguishing his lantern in a violent hiss of steam.
In total darkness, Len gripped the ankle lanyard with his right hand as the torrent seized his legs. He dragged him backward toward the narrow throat of the drainage water chute. The water-pressure head was huge. Hundreds of gallons of trapped, freezing irrigation runoff that had sat behind the root dam for months, carrying stones, rotting compost, and dead wood in a churning, choking slurry.
The roar in the confined space was overwhelming. That solid wall of sound shook the granite ceiling and shook in his teeth. He was tossed like a piece of drift timber. His shoulders scraped against the rough dark rock arch stones as the flood surged around him. The water was bitter cold, sucking the breath from his lungs with the shock of an open ice hole.
He clamped his mouth shut. He held the breath he had conserved with his third milestone improvement. He refused to open his lungs to the foul black flood. His Surefoot was useless here. There was no friction on the slime-coated floor, no purchase for his boots against the rushing tide. The water was five feet deep in an instant. It filled the under-road drain to the crown, drowning out all light, all air, all sense of direction.
